Mapping Memories

My dad was double jointed. He could lay his palm flat on the kitchen table and fold his hand until the back of it touched the backs of his fingers. He didn’t realize he could do it until one day when he was leaning with his hand on a wall. Someone saw how his hand was folded, and said he should be in the circus.

The tips of the middle and ring fingers of my father’s right hand were missing. A month short of his twentieth birthday, he’d gotten shot during the Battle of Arnhem*, in Holland. He was crossing a field to deliver the message that his infantry unit needed more ammunition. I don’t know why it was his job to deliver the message. Maybe his commanding officer thought he was the one most likely to find his way to where he needed to go. He was his unit’s map reader.

I remember him reading the Times from cover to cover, and mysteries on the beach, and phone books in your hotel rooms (“lots of Polish names in Columbus,” he might say). But I don’t particularly remember him reading maps.

On car trips, he drove while my mother navigated. When they wanted calculate their progress, she would read off the mileage between the towns along the route, and he would respond with the running subtotal. From the backseat, it sounded like this:

M: 10 and 14.

D: 24.

M: 37.

D: 61.

M: 12.

D. 73.

…and so on, call-and-response, neither one missing a beat, until they had added up how much more road lay ahead. Hearing him add all those numbers in his head, I was dazzled.

He could read a map and he could fold back his fingers, but he couldn’t fold a map to save his life. That was also my mother’s job –smoothing the wrinkles, figuring out which way the pleats went, and closing it into a tidy accordion with the pretty tourist picture on the front, like the cover of a book.

In the book I’ve been writing and sending around and rewriting and sending around again and rewriting again since the beginning of this century, a ghost becomes displaced in time and ends up eavesdropping on events that took place before she was born.  At one point, a woman’s perfume stirs memories from times that are in the ghost’s past, but years to come for the people she’s watching, so she’s simultaneously remembering and predicting the jasmine of her mother’s perfume, the woods outside her cabin at camp, the smell of steam rising from a particular pavement in the rain, the skunky must of her husband’s skin.

“Odor by odor, [her] memories unfolded. Fold by fold, they told the forgotten flipsides of stories she’d thought she remembered.”

The flipside of my father’s injury was that it took him out of combat. My mother used to say it may well have saved his life. Another way of putting it is that those two fingertips was the price he paid so that my siblings and I might be born.

It boggles the brain. As another character in my book puts it, “The gears that grind God’s universe are beyond my understanding.”

Tuesday is the anniversary of my father’s death. On the secular calendar, the date was August 20, 1994. That’s the date I remember each year as I try to grab one more beach day before summer winds down. On the Jewish calendar, the date was 14 Elul, 5754. That’s the date I remember each year when I stand up to say Kaddish for him for in synagogue.

Sometimes 14 Elul falls closer to the end of August, sometimes it comes in early September, and sometimes it comes within a day or two of August 20. As a Jew, I’m used to tracking time on two not-quite-aligned systems. The surprise is that this year, for the first time since my father died, the calendars converge. It will happen again in 2032.

I’ll be 75—older than either of my parents lived to be. I have no road map to predict what will unfold between now and then—just two syncopated calendars to help me count how far I’m come, and enough memories to keep me writing.

*Also known as Operation Market Garden, and dramatized in the film “A Bridge to Far.” Thanks to my brother Ben for clarifying this detail.

Forgetting to remember

My dad died 17 years ago, on August 20, 1994, at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, during my parents’ annual Truro vacation. I usually pay attention to that date.

Judaism prescribes specific rituals for marking the anniversary of a parent’s death. There’s a 24-hour yahrzeit candle to be lit. A special prayer to stand up and recite at the daily synagogue service. It’s customary for the mourner to make a charitable contribution in memory of the loved one.

The yahrzeit date doesn’t follow the Gregorian calendar, but the Jewish, lunar one. For my Dad, that means Elul 13, the date that coincided with August 20 the year he passed away. Just in case I’m not paying attention to the Jewish calendar, my synagogue sends me a reminder. His yahrzeit this year falls on September 12.

The August date feels more real to me. It means summer vacation. Last year David and I were in Denmark. Two years before that, we were visiting my brother and his family at the Cape. There is no script for marking this secular date. I usually mention it to the people I’m with. On and off throughout the day, I’ll feel my father’s presence.

Last year, having a beer at a bar inCopenhagen, I remembered how sophisticated I felt, at eight, braving a sip of Daddy’s Tuborg when we visited Denmark in the summer of 1965. The year we were with my brother, there was no way not to remember our father at the beach – reading a Dick Francis paperback, noshing on roasted peanuts and burying the shells in the sand, joking with his friends, briefly braving the water, his arms splayed spasmodically as the cold surf surged over his swim trunks.

This year, I didn’t realize what day it was until it was over. We had just returned from visiting our son in Red Hook, New York. We toured Southwood Farm, where Sam has been working since February: pigs, chickens, a cow and her calf, a horse, Sam’s dog, goats, sheep, turkeys, vegetables, and a glorious view of the Hudson with the Catskills beyond.

“Sam’s great,” his boss told us, and ticked off his accomplishments. That was nice. It’s been a while since our last back-to-school night.

We ate dinner at a fantastic Italian restaurant, our table set up on the front porch of an old house.

The next morning we strolled around Rokeby Farm, where Sam and his roommates rent the 18th-century gardener’s house. We skipped stones on the surface of the river and checked out his landlady’s daughter’s CSA.

We packed two coolers full of happy meat from Southwood: goat, pig, ducks.

Lunch was delicious burritos from a cart beside a farm stand. We ate sitting on a blanket in a spot of shade over looking rolling fields, where a farmer was making hay.

On the way home, we visited the Circle Museum, at the side of Route 22 in Austerlitz. We’ve passed it lots of times, and always wanted to stop. At 40 mph, the place looks like a bunch of junk insanely recast as over-sized lawn ornaments. Exploring on foot reveals a dreamscape of industrial debris ingeniously fashioned into fanciful sculpture. We’ve got a spot in our backyard that’s just waiting for one of these pieces.

And where, in all this, was my father? He would have kvelled as much as we did to hear Sam praised. He would have been interested in seeing Southwood, but too hungry and nervous about our dinner reservation to really enjoy the visit. The dinner he would have adored. He wouldn’t have had much patience for our walk around Rokeby, but he would have loved talking to the other people who live there. The goat we brought home might have made him nervous. At the Circle Museum, I’m guessing he would have waited in the car.

But afterwards, on the beach with his friends, say, he would have told the story of what a quirky, fascinating place the Hudson Valley has become. And he would have shaken his head in amazement at his remarkable grandson, who lives so close to the land and works so well with his hands – so different from the way my father lived.

For us, it wasn’t a weekend for recalling old memories and reliving the past. It was a time for laying down new ones, and imagining the future. It would have been that for my father, too.